Taylor facility to house detained immigrant
families?

Private company
would add toys and playground equipment

A private correctional facility in Taylor could be undergoing some rather
unusual renovations, complete with toys, safety scissors and playground
equipment.

Under a new agreement approved by Williamson County commissioners, the T. Don
Hutto Correctional Center would be remodeled to temporarily house illegal
immigrant families being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Currently, there is only one such facility in the United States.

In December, the county approved a contract allowing the federal agency to
house detainees at the facility, which is owned and operated by Corrections
Corporation of America. The new agreement, signed last week, changes the class
of detainees from adult men to families, said Dale Rye of the Williamson County
attorney's office.

Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not confirm that the
facility would be used to house families awaiting deportation but did say that
it would house noncriminal immigration detainees.

There are no detainees at the facility now, officials said.

"We have negotiated with (Corrections Corporation of America) and other
facilities in Texas," said Ernestine Fobbs, a spokeswoman for the federal
agency. "No decisions have been made at this time."

But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a speech last month
the government plans to open more family detention facilities, saying that, "up
until now, we have not had the ability to detain families that have come across
as a group because we don't have the capability to keep them together in a
detention facility."

The facility in Taylor would change its name to the T. Don Hutto Residential
Center, and the interior would not be as restrictive as the current
medium-security correctional facility, according to documents outlining the
changes. It would still be secure from the outside and could hold 600 detainees,
the documents say.

Men and women would sleep in separate sections of the building, but bunks
would be padded for extra safety, and playpens and cribs would be added,
according to the documents. Corrections Corporation of America would also
provide classroom space and instruction for children and adults.

The only facility in the country that houses detained families is in Berks
County, Pa., Fobbs said.

Typically, families that cannot be immediately sent back to their home
countries are either separated, with men, women and children going to different
facilities, or released on bond until their court date, she said.

Barbara Hines, a University of Texas law professor who runs the school's
Immigration Clinic, said the plans for family detention centers could be part of
a strategy to make it harder for immigrants to be released.

"Usually people who enter the United States without documents with children
are released" on bond, she said. "They're not incarcerated."

Steve Owen, a spokesman for Corrections Corporation of America, declined to
comment on the new contract.

The county, which has an administrative role in the arrangement, will work as
a go-between in billing transactions between Immigration and Customs Enforcement
and Corrections Corporation of America, said Rick Zinsmeyer, director of adult
probation for the county. The county will earn $1 per day for each inmate at the
facility — about $200,000 annually — if the facility is at capacity, Zinsmeyer
said.

***********

See follow-up below:

Immigrant Families Sold Out, Locked Up

By Amy Goodman, King
Features Syndicate

March 2, 2007

"I want to be free. I want to go outside, and I want to go to school,"
pleaded a 9-year-old boy, on the phone from prison. This prison wasn't in some
far-off country, some dictatorship where one would expect children to be locked
up. He is imprisoned in the United States.

The boy, Kevin, is imprisoned in Taylor, Texas, at the T. Don Hutto
Residential Facility. His parents are also locked up there. The tale of how this
family became imprisoned is just one example of how broken our immigration
policies are in this country. It is a tale of children left behind, of family
values locked up, of your tax dollars at work.

The parents are Iranian and spent 10 years in Canada seeking asylum. Kevin,
their son, was born in Canada during that time. Their request for asylum was
eventually denied, and they were deported back to Iran. Majid, the father, said
he and his wife were jailed and tortured there. They soon fled to Turkey and
bought Greek passports. They hoped to reapply for asylum in Canada, armed with
proof of the torture they suffered in Iran.

On a plane back to Canada, a fellow passenger suffered a heart attack,
requiring an unscheduled landing in Puerto Rico. Although they never had any
intention of entering the U.S., because the plane touched down here, their
passports were questioned and they were detained. The family was shipped off to
Hutto. They have been there for more than three weeks.

Immigration detention places the family in a legal limbo that could leave
them imprisoned indefinitely, perhaps only to be deported back to more torture
in Iran.

This shameful practice of locking up children is bad enough. What's worse is
that it is being done for profit, by the Corrections Corporation of America. CCA
is the largest publicly traded private prison operator in the U.S. CCA has close
to 70 facilities scattered across the country, recent earnings of $1.33 billion
and a gain in its stock-share price of 85 percent in the past year. Industry
analysts gush at the profit potential promised by private prisons. Their
commodity: human beings.

A recent report issued jointly by two nonprofit agencies -- the Women's
Commission for Refugee Women and Children and the Lutheran Immigration and
Refugee Service -- titled "Locking Up Family Values: The Detention of Immigrant
Families," paints a grim picture of the conditions these families endure. While
in 2005 Congress directed the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration
and Customs Enforcement to detain families in "non-penal, homelike
environments," the report details how prison-like the Hutto facility is. While
ICE announced Hutto as a new facility, it was formerly a prison.

Children as young as 6 are separated from their parents, kept in prison cells
with heavy steel doors equipped with a sensitive laser alarm system. The
children wear prison uniforms. They get one hour of school per day, and one hour
of recreation. All non-lawyer visits are "non-contact," through a Plexiglas
window speaking over a phone, to obviate the "necessity" of a full-body cavity
search after each visit. Yet the chairman of the CCA board of directors, William
Andrews, begs to differ: "The reports come from special-interest groups that are
attempting to do away with privatization and the whole immigration situation.
... The family facility, particularly, at T. Don Hutto is almost like a home."
Recent reports put the total number of children at Hutto between 170 and 200.

Close to a year after massive pro-immigrant marches occurred in every major
U.S. city, immigration policy remains broken, with sensational crackdowns on
undocumented workers, a planned multibillion-dollar wall along the U.S.-Mexico
border and more than 26,000 immigrants in prison.

CCA stock is up, but the spirits of 9-year-old Kevin are down, as he
languishes in his federally funded private prison cell. He wants to go home to
Canada, where he was born. U.S. immigration officials now hold his fate and that
of his parents: deportation to possible torture in Iran, or political asylum and
a possible return to Canada. With a Congress obsessed with nonbinding
resolutions and the Bush administration that brought you Abu Ghraib and the
Maher Arar deportation scandal, the prospects for Kevin and his parents are grim
at best.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program,
Democracy Now!